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Alicia: Are you gay? No, CBS' The Good Wife is NOT a P.I. show. There is also -- refreshingly -- little black and white on display here, just endless variations of we say/they say, making this one of the few lawyer show that goes beyond mere legal sleight of hand and simplistic fingerpointing to actually explore the true human cost and the vast gray areas of the legal system. But nobody has more secrets -- or prowls those gray areas better -- than KALINDA SHARMA, the firm’s tough, savvy, leather wrapped private investigator. For my money, she 's not just the most interesting character on the show -- she may just be the best private eye on American television these days. And in a long time. In fact, despite the numerous modern touches (data banks, computer hacking, cellphone taps and the oh-so-modern nods to her ambiguous sexuality), Kalinda is in many ways a throwback to the genre's roots. As played by Archie Panjabi (Bend It like Beckham), she presents a tightly wound professionalism rarely seen in the genre these days, never mind on mainstream television. The leather she sports is not the skin-clinging stuff of adolescent centerfold fantasy -- rather, she wears leather it like a thick shell to keep the world at bay. Her antecedents aren't nice guys like Jim Rockford or Thomas Magnum -- nope, her roots go back much further, back to a time when private eyes weren't automatically expected to be warm and cuddly. Professionally she's not just cold -- she's Hammett-cold, hard and brassy. Hell, the way she dispassionately works her cases, facing down her enemies without flinching and standing up to violence, she could be The Continental Op's illegitimate daughter. But she's no one-note character. A shrewd and clever investigator who'll do whatever and go wherever it takes (from dumpster diving to infiltrating high school locker rooms) to get what she wants, she's a breath of fresh air and surprising complexity in a genre that too often treats even major characters as shallow stick figures whose entire character is delineated by the first commercial break. The more we're told about Kalinda, it turns out, the less we actually know. Like much of the show, it's not just her loyalty, ethics, allegiances and motives that are ultimately shaded in ambivalence -- her personal life is also somewhere in the "don't ask, don't tell" area. Is she a dispassionate hard ass who only lives for the job? Or an anything-goes party girl? Is she a lesbian? Bisexual? Straight as a crooked arrow? Asexual? It's hard to tell. But it's that frostiness, coupled with the murkiness of her background and her hard-boiled professionalism that keeps me coming back. In the first season, we learned that she used to work for Peter, and now she seems to be willing to sell him out to his poltical enemies. Or is she? It's in the second season, however, that Kalinda really came into her own, even as the veneer of her personal life oh-so-slowly started to slip. A mergerbrings Blake (Scott Porter), a professional rival, into the firm, but it's instantly obvious these two are not going to get along, either personally or professionally. And matters are exacerbated when Blake begins to taunt Kalinda, dropping hints that he knows all about her past. Suffice it to say she does not take it well. Given her buttoned-down aloofness, Kalinda's hands-on attack on Blake's unprotected car with a aluminium baseball bat is shocking and unsettling. But even giving into rage she's still enough of a hard-ass to challenge a witness who stumbles her impulsive act of vandalism in the deserted parking garage. "What the hell are you looking at?" she demands of the awestruck citizen. "Call the police!" And then, as the citizen scurries off, she continues to destroy the car. Now that's cold. Later on this season an old lover, Donna, brilliantly played by Lili Tyler, also shows up, with an unspecified axe to grind, although it has something to do with Kalinda not being "domestic" enough -- whatever that means. Whether the writers can keep the mystery of Kalinda's past spinning just out of viewers' reach indefinitely is hard to tell, but frankly, I hope they can. I don't want them to turn her into just another soggy-edged weenie carting around more baggage than a bus station. We've had enough of those in the last few years. Kalinda's absolutely riveting to watch just as she is, the held-in-check ambivalence a facet of her evolving character; not a cookie cutter substitute for actual depth. Imagine! An old fashioned gumshoe, actually working cases on behalf of a client. No ghostly visitors providing convenient clues, no psychic baloney, no CSI voodoo, no burned spies, no OC cases, no human lie detectors, no personal agendas on every single case – just a hard-boiled dick who gets hired to investigate and actually works cases. How long has it been since we've seen THAT? I tell you, if The Good Wife ever tanks, they oughtta spin Kalinda off into her own show. I'd watch it. THE EVIDENCE
UNDER OATH
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